Trident Alternatives Review

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Danny Alexander]

I agree with many of the things President Obama has said, including in his recent Berlin speech. I would point the hon. Lady, however, to the Government’s own threat assessment in the strategic security and defence review, which says that state-on-state nuclear attacks are a tier 2 threat. I will come to the threat analysis in a moment.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

This is the nub of matter. That is just one threat assessment, but no serious conflict with which this country has been involved over decades—extending even to the second world war—has been expected. Wars are unexpected, so why does the right hon. Gentleman rest any assurance on a single threat assessment? How does he know that that threat assessment will not have to be changed in a few days’ time, let alone in 10 or 20 years?

[Danny Alexander]

I will address that point as I move through my speech, although I am glad to have taken my hon. Friend’s intervention. All I would say is that the degree of readiness of our conventional weapons and forces is scaled to the threats of the time, and my precise proposal is that we could adopt a similar approach here.

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[John Woodcock]

Absolutely. On the Liberal Democrats’ official figures, the savings will not even start to accrue until 2025, but by that time work would have to be well under way in Barrow shipyard and the supply chain to make the costly preparations for the Astute successor submarines. The Liberal Democrats need to come clean about the extra cost, because it makes a mockery of what the right hon. Gentleman rightly said are incredibly modest savings over a 30, 40 or 50-year period.

It should be remembered that the capacity to build nuclear submarines is one of the very few sovereign protected capabilities deemed so important and sensitive that the overwhelming majority of construction must be carried out on British soil. The submarine supply chain—centred in Barrow, but stretching from Aberdeen to Plymouth—is so advanced and finely tuned that any period in which it is left idle risks destroying it entirely. That is the lesson of the mass redundancies in my constituency in the 1990s. It is a great shame that some of those who now have the privilege of governing do not seem to have learnt a thing.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I am distressed to raise this point, but for some reason the Chief Secretary seems to have adopted a posture of preserved deterrence—that is, he is not here. He left the Chamber shortly after the Opposition spokesman sat down, in a three-hour debate of such importance. I am afraid that I regard that as rather a discourtesy to the House. Did the Chief Secretary give a reason when he left the Chamber and, if not, should he not have done so as a courtesy to the House?

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[Angus Robertson (Moray) (SNP)]

I am pleased to be able to take part in a debate on the alternatives review, which many people with different views on deterrence theory believe to be fundamentally flawed because it did not consider all the alternatives. That is more relevant to Scotland than it is to many other places because Scotland probably has the highest megatonnage of weapons of mass destruction of any nation in the world.

The Liberal Democrats must be living in a parallel universe if they think that people in Scotland do not think it important to consider all the options, not least because the majority of our public representatives have voted against Trident renewal. In the Scottish Parliament on 14 June 2007, 71 Members of the Scottish Parliament voted against Trident renewal; only 16 voted in favour. In this place, on 14 March 2007, 33 Scottish MPs voted against the Trident renewal proposals, with only 22 voting for them.

This is the view not only of parliamentarians; it is consistently the view of the majority of people in Scotland. In October 2012, a YouGov poll showed that 57% of people in Scotland thought that the Scottish Parliament should have more powers to bring about the removal of Trident from Scotland. In September 2011, an Angus Reid poll for the Sunday Express showed that 57% of people in Scotland did not agree that Trident should be based on the Clyde. In 2010, a YouGov poll showed that 56% of people in Scotland believed that we should not buy a replacement for Trident. It goes on and on.

[Mr Jenkin]

Let me draw the hon. Gentleman’s attention to the report produced by the Public Administration Committee, which experimented with deliberative polling to find out how to inform national strategy at the heart of government by engaging with the public. What did the poll conducted on our behalf show? The final question asked whether the United Kingdom should order four new submarines or give up nuclear weapons altogether. In Scotland, 49% were in favour and 43% were against.

[Angus Robertson]

As the hon. Gentleman knows, there are always outliers in polling—[Interruption.] I reflect on the fact that the Scottish National party is the only majority Government in the United Kingdom, receiving more votes than all of the three UK parties combined on the second vote. The hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) can laugh, but he represents a party that is the worst-performing centre-right party in the industrialised world. That is how badly it performs in Scotland. Even when his friend Lord Ashcroft polled in Scotland, he found that in principle 48% of Scottish respondents oppose the UK having nuclear weapons.

The Liberal Democrat review would have been worthy, as the former Defence Secretary the right hon. Member for Coventry North East (Mr Ainsworth) suggested, if it had taken evidence and spoken with other people—people outside the Ministry of Defence, people outside government. The Lib Dem spokesman could have met the Scottish Trades Union Congress and spoken to its general secretary, Grahame Smith, who said that renewing Trident “will cost Scotland jobs”. We might not all agree with those views, but they are views of important people, and if we are going to have a review that looks into alternatives, surely the relevant people should be spoken to.

Did the right hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Danny Alexander) meet the Scottish Trades Union Congress? No, he did not. Did he meet Unison, whose Scottish general secretary condemned the Government’s decision to replace Britain’s Trident nuclear fleet?

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[Sir Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) (Con)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Sir Nick Harvey), who was a very good and collegiate colleague in the Ministry of Defence. I am sorry that he was not able fully to carry out this work, because had he done so, I suspect the result would have been a lot better than this inadequate document that has been presented to the country today. It has taken two years to produce what has amounted to a mouse.

It is important that we remember the context. In 2009, the leader of the Liberal Democrat party, who is now the Deputy Prime Minister, said in this House that

“we should admit that we neither need nor can afford to replace Trident.”—[Official Report, 1 July 2009; Vol. 495, c. 297.]

That is where the Liberal Democrat party was a few years ago. It now appears to agree that we should continue with the deterrent, albeit on a part-time basis. However, this is not the end of the story. This is not the party’s defined position. The document does not represent the settled policy of the Liberal Democrats. That is to be settled by their whacky members at their party conference later this year. Therefore, whatever is said from the Dispatch Box, or by Liberal Democrat Members, is not the final word on this matter of huge importance. One thing that can be said of the document is that at least it has sparked this important debate, which has produced some extremely impressive speeches that I hope will gain wider currency across the country.

I wish to make three points. First, the deterrent has deterred. It has worked. We therefore do not need to invite people to make an act of faith.

[Mr Jenkin]

I listened carefully to the honest and courageous speech by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), in which she said that the more countries that have nuclear weapons, the more likely it is that they will be used. Does my hon. Friend agree that the only time nuclear weapons have been used was when only one country had them, and that as more countries have acquired them the likelihood of their being used has decreased? No nuclear weapon has been used since more than two countries have had nuclear weapons. Does that not tell us something?

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

It does, but, if I may, I will come on to my hon. Friend’s point in a moment.

My second point is that, yes, the deterrent has worked and it worked during the cold war. The argument is that the cold war has ended and so we no longer need the deterrent. However, as my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) said, we cannot predict what threats we might face in the next 30 or 40 years. While there appears today to be no immediate nuclear threat to our country, we know that other countries either have, or intend to acquire, a nuclear capability, and that there are approximately 17,000 nuclear weapons in existence.

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[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I will confine my remarks to just a few points. I congratulate the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) on bringing out the NATO side of the debate. Our continuous-at-sea deterrence is an important contribution to NATO. It is a pay-back to the United States for being the ultimate guarantor of European security. We should not imagine for a minute that if we started downgrading our deterrent, the United States would remain as interested as it is now in maintaining security in Europe, with all the benefit for this country.

This debate has demolished the credibility of the document. The idea that it came as a surprise that submarine-launched cruise missiles with new nuclear tips were going to be fantastically expensive represents a scale of political dishonesty that stretches the imagination even for Liberal Democrats. I cannot imagine how anybody has ever taken the document seriously.

The debate has essentially been about continuous-at-sea deterrence or not. The document damns the idea of a part-time deterrent. Paragraph 33 states that a non-continuous posture depends upon political confidence that

“a potential aggressor would not launch a no-notice pre-emptive attack”—

there is no guarantee of that;

“with sufficient warning, the UK could re-constitute back-to-back patrolling”—

there is no guarantee of that;

“such back-to-back patrols could then be sustained long enough to cover any emergent crisis”—

and there is no guarantee of that if we have only three or two boats.

The point that I wish to make briefly is what defence policy is really about. It is not about predicting the future and working out what we might use. It is not about pretending that we can assess threats and that then settles what we need for the future. The whole point about defence planning and defence policy is that it is about preparing for what we do not expect, making contingencies for what we cannot foresee. That is what the whole document fails to do. The idea that we now live in a different world from the one we lived in during the cold war, and therefore that the global environment has given us permission to downgrade our nuclear capability, is clearly nonsense.

There is another misunderstanding. This is not a weapons system that we have not used, do not use and are unlikely to use. The importance of our continuous-at-sea deterrent is that we use it every day. It shapes the global environment in which we live. Why is state-on-state warfare a second-tier threat rather than a primary threat? Why has state-on-state warfare between the major powers become unthinkable since the end of the first half of the 20th century? It is because those major powers have nuclear weapons. Were we to start destabilising the credibility of our continuous-at-sea deterrence, we would be destabilising the very global environment that the Liberal Democrats believe gives them permission to go part-time on our deterrent. My hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth) put it well. The part-time deterrent is no deterrent. We might as well pack it in unless we are going to stick with continuous at-sea deterrent.